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In last week's column, I shared how the PC industry flattened out during the last quarter and that I believe the PC industry has matured to the point where we cannot expect major growth to come from PCs in the future. I pointed out that the only real bright spot will be the new ultrabooks, or laptops that are very similar to the MacBook Air, that will hit the market later this year that should give the laptop market a boost. However, the PC market could settle into a regular 5 to10 percent growth cycle at best.

I also suggested that we are now moving from the PC age and into a world focused even more on "personalized" computing. I think that the term "post-PC era" is incorrect. If you take apart a smartphone or tablet, it has just about every component that is present in a normal PC. They are computers in every sense of the word.

On the surface, the PC industry and PC companies that have a history as computer hardware vendors see this as a new opportunity to extend their PC design and manufacturing prowess to this new extended opportunity in personalized computing. But they are not acting on it. Except for Apple, which has made this transition quite smoothly, the rest of the PC vendors are quite challenged when it comes to designing products outside their normal PC expertise. And it is really unclear to me if they ever will be able to extend their experience in PC and laptop expertise to new personalized computing devices.

It gets even more challenging for them when you realize that hardware is only one-third of the success equation in this era of personalized computing. In the future, there will also be an apps layer and a services layer, and these will need to work with and react to a cloud-based back end. The various screens in our lives, whether they are in mobile devices, built into appliances, or fixtures and in our cars, may be smart, but they get much smarter when they have apps and are connected to the Internet.

At the moment, most of the PC vendors realize that moving to a tablet/smartphone extension of their business is pretty tough. The big guys seem to be putting more energy into their core strengths, which are enterprise computing and SMB. I don't think they will give up, but I suspect it will be a big struggle for them to create "personalized" computing devices that really add to their bottom line, especially if they need a strong apps' and services' back end in order to own the customer.

This leaves room for potential outsiders to swoop in and become major players if they have the ability to create new "screens" of their own that can be tied to a rich ecosystem of apps and cloud services. The one that I see on the horizon that fits this description the best is Amazon. It is widely rumored that it will do a tablet this fall. But it's Amazon's back end and services that could make it a major player overnight. It has a music store, a video store, an Android apps store, and the big kickercredit cards of over 200 million users. Like Apple, it has spent over a decade building this back end and customer loyalty/commerce engine and would be well positioned to become the number two consumer tablet player almost overnight.

Tim Bajarin is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts, and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981 and has served as a consultant to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba, and numerous others. Mr. Bajarin is known as a concise, futuristic analyst, credited with predicting the desktop publishing revolution three years before it...
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